Score!

For a second, Baby laughed down at her, his bland, brown, unrepentant face irresistibly young and beautiful, caught in the lights from the house. Then he kissed her.

Rigid with shock, Flora clamped her mouth shut, but such was the darting insistence of his tongue that her lips soon opened, and she was kissing him back with ecstatic enthusiasm.

‘I thought you only liked men,’ she gasped, when she finally drew breath.

‘No more Mr Nice Gay,’ crowed Baby. ‘I take the best of both sexes, and you are definitely the best. I fancy you absolutely squint-eyed.’

‘You’re drunk.’ Flora made a last attempt to keep control, but as he rolled her towards him to unzip her dress, the warmth of his body melted her resistance.

‘I love George,’ she mumbled, into his smooth, scented shoulder.

‘George has gone off like a prawn in the sun. Deserves all he gets. Oh, you little beaut.’

Baby was a master of the tease. Running his fingers round the side of one nipple until every nerve of her breast was crying out, stroking her belly over and over again, letting his hand creep up her inner thighs, just stopping short of her clitoris, until she was screaming to have his cock inside her, and even then he was totally in control.

When Charity came out, mewing in outrage that plastered humans had mistaken Pedigree Chum for Go-Cat, Baby just laughed and said, ‘Cattus interruptus.’

He was so relaxed.

There were daisies and little shimmering moths all over the lawn and stars all over the sky. Gradually they seemed to merge.

‘I’m having such a heavenly time,’ mumbled Flora, ‘but I’m far too drunk to come.’

‘Wanna bet.’ Sliding out of her, turning her over, Baby kissed each bump of her backbone, slowly, slowly progressing downwards.

‘Oh, my God! Oh, my God!’

‘Yes, I thought you’d enjoy that.’

‘Do I taste of snake?’ mumbled Flora.

‘No, only of Paradise.’

‘How d’you know so much about women?’ asked Flora, as they lay back, stupefied with pleasure, on the grass.

‘I used to be married.’

‘What?’ Flora sat bolt upright.

‘To a singer.’

‘Why did it break up?’

Baby took a slug of Moët. ‘She asked me what I thought of her in the Verdi Requiem. I was foolish enough to tell her. She never spoke to me again.’

‘Did you mind?’

‘Nope.’

‘Isn’t it rather immoral, pretending you’re gay when you’re not?’

‘Certainly not. However would I get rid of all those ugly cows if they suspected I was heterosexual?’

‘You are seriously degenerate,’ said Flora, as they fell asleep in each other’s arms.

30

Waking cold, stiff and horribly hung over in the morning, Flora was demented. How could she have done this to George? He’d never forgive her if he found out. Rannaldini had spies everywhere and was bound to tell him. ‘I’m being punished for shortchanging that cat,’ she moaned, as she crunched around on the Go-Cat the furious Charity had up-ended all over the kitchen floor.

‘I will take care of you,’ said a totally unfazed Baby.

But when Flora returned, crawling with embarrassment, to her dressing room at Valhalla, she found her puppet fox had been cut to tiny pieces. Flora went berserk. She had had Foxie since she was a baby. He had always brought her luck. Without his protection, George would never come back. And who could have cut him up? Rannaldini, Helen, Hermione and Serena all hated her, so did Wolfie and probably Pushy, Bernard and Sexton, after yesterday’s débâcle. Or perhaps some admirer of Baby’s, outraged she’d got off with him last night. It was all dreadfully frightening.

Everyone was very sympathetic, particularly Rozzy, who gathered up fragments of orange fur and said she’d soon sew Foxie together again.

‘Rozzy’s so lovely,’ a tearful Flora told Baby. ‘If only she could get rid of that horrible husband and find some heavenly lover.’

‘Hard to kiss a woman whose mouth’s always full of pins.’

Flora was far too miserable to have dinner with Tristan that night.

Tab, too, was absolutely miserable. Isa was back in Australia so Wolfie came and watched the Derby with her at Magpie Cottage. Then she had the exquisite but agonizing pleasure of seeing Rupert and his entourage in their grey top hats streaming, solemn as warlords, into the paddock to watch Peppy Koala saddling up.

‘Look, there’s Lysander, and Declan, Daddy’s partner,’ she told Wolfie, ‘and Billy Lloyd-Foxe, who was his great show-jumping mate, and Ricky France-Lynch and Bas Baddingham, his old polo friends.’

‘Who’s that blonde?’ asked Wolfie, thinking she was beautiful.

‘My half-sister, Perdita, uptight bitch. That’s her husband, Luke Alderton, he’s a saint. Heavens! Marcus has flown back from Moscow. That must be Nemerovsky, his boyfriend. Look at the stupid poof showing off,’ Tab added furiously, as a smiling Nemerovsky waved his top hat to acknowledge the cheers of the crowd. Wolfie, who’d been at boarding school with Marcus, thought how happy he looked.

‘Here comes Taggie,’ hissed Tabitha, as her stepmother, ravishing in a fuchsia-pink silk suit and a big violet hat, was towed into the paddock by a thoroughly overexcited Xav and Bianca.